Jeremy Racine, SAS has immersed himself in big data and analytics for 16 years, including a comprehensive focus on healthcare. He is an advocate for the use of technology in public and private sectors to improve quality, cost, access, and effectiveness of care.

As Healthcare Director for the SAS State & Local Government Practice, Jeremy evangelizes the benefits of prescriptive analytics in healthcare. He has presented at international healthcare events, authored healthcare analytics publications, and participated in global healthcare initiatives such as the Ebola & Zika response. He has led solution development efforts using clinical, claim, and social determinant data and champions the use of a Health Analytics Framework to improve population health, payment reform, Medicaid management, managed care and state employee health benefits. He understands the impacts of healthcare reform/ACA, federally supported innovation programs and the interdependencies between healthcare policy, programs and providers/payers/patients. He works within the public sector to identify and develop ways in which analytics can foster innovation and improve health outcomes for all.

" Saving Lives with Predictive Analytics"

Advanced analytics are helping to support improved quality of care, reduce costs and create healthier outcomes. We will be discussing examples of how predictive analytics have been used to save lives in Wake County and address Sepsis in one of the largest healthcare systems in the nation. In addition, we will explore a quick demonstration of outcomes based analytics based on Episodes of Care.

Paula Edwards, Ph.D., Himformatics: Dr Paula Edwards is the Director of Analytics at Himformatics, LLC. As an industrial engineer, she helps clients use information and technology to improve quality, safety, efficiency, and value in healthcare. She has twenty years of experience in design and implementation of analytics and information management solutions in various industries, including healthcare. Dr. Edwards has worked with numerous healthcare provider organization on analytics strategy and program management, solution design & implementation, and design and implementation of data governance programs. She has presented at numerous industry conferences and is co-author on 20+ peer-reviewed publications.

“Data Standards: How to get started”

Many healthcare organizations today are plagued with conflicting data. Often, it isn’t that the data is inaccurate, it is that the different definitions or sources were used to pull the data. The results is time wasted investigating why numbers don’t match and which number is ‘right’. Because of this, many organizations are starting to establish data governance to define data standards and a ‘source of truth’ for key metrics and data elements. There are so many different reports and metrics being generated across the organization, it can be difficult to figure out where to start.

This presentation will highlight case studies from three provider organizations: a large integrated delivery network in the midst of a merger, a large academic medical center, and a regional pediatric health system. For each we will discuss: how they prioritized which data standards to develop, key stakeholders involved in both prioritization and defining the standards, which metrics they started with and why. Lessons learned for promoting adoption of data standards based on these case studies will be provided.

Randy L. Thomas, FHIMSS, Encore:Ms. Thomas has over 30 years of experience in health information technology, with a focus on analytics, surveillance and the re-use of data to support population health management, quality, safety, and efficiency performance improvement efforts of healthcare organizations. Having served in a variety of leadership roles in strategic consulting, product management and product marketing, Ms. Thomas offers a seasoned perspective on how to drive measurable results through the use of business intelligence in healthcare.

Currently Ms. Thomas is a managing director for Advisory Solutions at Encore, A Quintiles Company. In this role Ms. Thomas is responsible for the definition of a suite of data and analytics oriented consulting solutions – including the go-to-market strategy, sales support and consulting role requirements – that support population health management IT-enablement and other data-based analytics needs. The solution suite is heavily focused on the emerging analytics needs of organizations in transition from fee-for-serve to fee-for-value.

Previously, Ms. Thomas was vice president of portfolio strategy and design at Premier Inc, where she led the re-design of the analytics and surveillance portfolio and the social business platform. Prior to joining Premier, Ms. Thomas was an associate partner in the healthcare provider practice of Global Business Services for IBM, created and led the health analytics strategy practice, was a fellow in the IBM Center for Healthcare Management and co-authored the IBM study “Healthcare 2015: Win-win or Lose-lose? A Portrait and a Path to Transformation”. Ms. Thomas joined IBM in 2005 on the acquisition of Healthlink. At Healthlink Ms. Thomas successively led the thought leadership, strategic services and Eclipsys service areas. Prior to joining Healthlink, Ms. Thomas held a series of product planning, product development and marketing strategy roles at Eclipsys Corporation and Transition Systems, Inc.

“Readying Analytics for Value-based Care”

A large Midwest IDN realized they needed to update their 20-year-old, proprietary collection of data warehouses into a more sustainable, scalable solution that could support the needs of their organization in the shift to value-based care. Engage the wide array of stakeholders across the organization with vested interests in the current capabilities as well as those expressing needs for current, accurate information about organizational performance in a transparent process to define requirements and consider various options. A pragmatic roadmap that defined a contemporary analytics architecture that could be built-out incrementally, supported in the cloud, and accept data from all legacy sources as well as new sources moving forward. Budget approval for the first stage of the project was just obtained and the organization is moving into implementation mode with all stakeholders on board.